Tablo announces new ‘Lite’ version of their DVR for those wanting to use their own hard drives or cloud storage

Tablo has announced a new less expensive DVR called the Tablo DUAL LITE. It’s identical to the existing Tablo DUAL that they released last year but the LITE version comes with no internal storage. Instead, customers can connect upto an 8TB external hard drive for their local DVR storage needs or use Tablo’s cloud DVR service, which is currently in beta.

Tablo is an all-in-one solution for those wanting to watch and record over-the-air TV through an Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, or Fire TV Edition television. The Tablo box connects to an OTA antenna and connects to your home network through either ethernet or WiFi. The OTA content is accessed through the Tablo app for Fire TV, which is soon getting revamped.

The new Tablo DUAL LITE can be used as-is to watch live OTA content. Connecting an external hard drive allows you to record that content. Tablo says a 1TB drive will hold between 250-500 hours of HDTV, depending on your quality settings.

Tablo is working on a cloud DVR service that stores your recorded content online so you don’t need to have a local hard drive. The service is currently in beta and offers 40GB of cloud storage. Tablo has not revealed how much the cloud DVR service will cost once it’s release to the public.

The new Tablo DUAL LITE will retail for $139.99, which is considerably less than the original model with 64GB of internal storage that retails for $219.99. The Tablo DUAL LITE is currently only available in stores at Best Buy.

One thing that isn’t mentioned is that there is an additional fee for guide data. $5/month, $50/year, $150/lifetime. Otherwise; the Tablo only has VCR capabilities and there will be no out of home streaming allowed.

The plug and play USB storage is an improvement over Tivo. It’s difficult to swap out a drive to a Tivo as it requires you to crack open the case and a drive over 3TB requires connection to a PC for additional formatting.

Many external USB drives are only designed for archival storage and will probably fail within a year with 24×7 reading and writing.

The ease of access through set-top boxes and smart TVs is also an improvement over Tivo as Tivo requires their own expensive proprietary set-top box for each TV with limited apps that are rarely updated. And they don’t support a wireless connection.

With only 2 tuners you’re probably going to be recording most of the time so you’ll need to use your TV’s tuner for live TV.